Rick Holmes: A blizzard of pink slips

Saturday

Jan 24, 2009 at 12:01 AMJan 24, 2009 at 10:46 PM

Jobs are falling like leaves in autumn. It's January, when the bills come due, when employers who didn't want to deliver bad news during the holidays lower the boom. Those jobs come in all shapes and sizes. Home construction is dead. High tech? Bose just announced it's laying off 1,000 employees. Data storage giant EMC is letting 2,400 workers go. Microsoft is laying off 5,000.

Rick Holmes

Dennis from Toledo tells me the Jeep plant where he worked for 30 years was running three shifts a couple of years ago. It's down to one shift now, and with Chrysler in critical condition, who knows what will happen next.

A friend in Pennsylvania tells me he was hoping to get work at a cabinet factory in his small town, but now the MasterBrand Cabinet factory is closing down, putting 415 of his neighbors out of work.

Looks like the Snap-on tool factory is closing, too, after 40 years in Natick, Mass. "We've done everything that's been asked of us and now we're all out on the street," said Gordon Hamilton, a maintenance mechanic with 23 years on the job.

Circuit City is closing 567 stores - with 34,000 employees - as the nationwide chain goes belly up. Filene's Basement stores are closing as well. Smaller stores, at malls and in town centers, are also giving up the ghost, victims of a shopping season that didn't come close to what they needed.

Jobs are falling like leaves in autumn. It's January, when the bills come due, when employers who didn't want to deliver bad news during the holidays lower the boom.

Those jobs come in all shapes and sizes. Home construction is dead. High tech? Bose just announced it's laying off 1,000 employees. Data storage giant EMC is letting 2,400 workers go. Microsoft is laying off 5,000.

Will Washington come to the rescue? President Barack Obama and Congress are ready to throw some $800 billion at the recession, but turning that into jobs will be tricky.

This isn't the 1930s, when FDR's minions could line up all the unemployed men, hand them each a shovel and put them to work building things. Public construction is more complicated today, requiring heavy equipment and skilled workers. Even "shovel-ready" jobs can be slowed by requirements for bidding, bonding and permitting.

Federal money for improving energy efficiency in federal buildings and homes could get some idle home construction workers back on a payroll, but that will be complicated, too.

A few people around here may benefit from new subsidies for developing alternative energy sources, but those will be research jobs for the most part, not manufacturing. A massive government investment in computerizing health records will produce jobs eventually, but it will be awhile.

Because of these difficulties, much of the stimulus money will go to minimizing layoffs by government and sustaining spending by people who have lost income. Unemployment benefits will be extended, food stamps increased, government-subsidized health care expanded.

There are limits to what government can do. The economy will really begin reviving when the money in private hands, trillions of dollars on the sidelines waiting for market conditions to improve, starts flowing again. It will take time - and sacrifice - to make that happen.

Obama spotlighted one kind of sacrifice in his inaugural address, praising "the selflessness of workers who would rather cut their hours than see a friend lose their job."

We've seen little of that kind of sacrifice in the private sector. CEOs aren't giving up their lavish perks, and unions aren't loosening their demands. In the public sector, there's been at least talk of alternatives to layoffs.

Boston Mayor Tom Menino has challenged city employees to accept a one-year wage freeze. As one of his first acts, Obama imposed a wage freeze on White House staff making more than $100,000. There are no doubt other examples across the nation.

Union leaders, though, don't like to give anything up. Most union officers have seniority, and they tend to protect the benefits enjoyed by most senior workers, even if that means less senior employees lose their jobs.

But there are good reasons to change that thinking. When pink slips go out, those who survive not only lose valued friends and colleagues, they end up with more work. When teachers are laid off, classes get larger for those who remain. "Survivor's guilt" kicks in as well. Sharing the sacrifice, on the other hand, makes people feel better.

The economy will get worse before it gets better, the experts say. That should give us time to move the conversation from "what will the government do about it?" to "what can we do about it?

Rick Holmes, opinion editor of the MetroWest Daily News, blogs at Holmes & Co. (http://blogs.townonline.com/holmesandco). He can be reached at rholmes@cnc.com.

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